Nottingham-built Raleigh bikes used a number of unique, proprietary threadings and dimensions, making it difficult, but not impossible, to upgrade them with modern parts. This article covers the pitfalls and strategies for dealing with them.

This article describes one way of building a tandem by grafting two solos together. The resulting tandem will not have the ride quality nor the reliability of a multi-thousand-dollar tandem from a tandem specialist builder. It will, however, be superior to many "serious" tandems of the 1970's and earlier.

If you like strange bikes, you would like my Fixed/free mountain bike. It has a truly weird drive train!

It has a "flip-flop" (reversible) hub, which is threaded for a freewheel on one side, and a fixed sprocket on the other. It has a 2-speed freewheel, so, depending on how you look at it, it is a 1-speed, a 2-speed or a 3-speed...

Being a firm believer that nothing exceeds like excess, I turned my O.T.B. into a bit of a project bike. When Specialized introduced the Saturne X-22 rim, the first really light, narrow 559 mm (26" mtb size) (unless you count the handmade cut-down Bontragers) I bought a pair of them, a pair of Panaracer 26x 1.5 radial tires, and built her up as a 63 speed machine using a Sturmey-Archer AW 3-speed hub, with a 7 sprocket cluster and triple chainwheel (3 X 7 X 3 = 63!)

In the 1980s, I wrote a regular monthly column in Bicycling magazine, on maintenance and repair, particularly focussed on the selection and use of tools. While some of this material is rather dated, much of it isn't. Since some of these articles deal with topics that are not covered in such depth elsewhere in this site, I'm putting them online.